Daily Archives: March 22, 2020

The coronavirus relief checks are coming. Businesses are closing, increasingly by state mandate; unemployment claims are spiking; and as many as eight in 10 American workers live paycheck-to-paycheck, while half can't cover an unexpected $400 expense. Republicans and Democrats alike in Washington agree on the necessity of cash aid distributed directly to the public, something in the range of $1,000 per adult and $500 per child.

The major point left to be settled is means testing: Should the payments be scaled down or phased out entirely for those in higher income brackets? Perhaps the expected response from libertarians like me and fiscal conservatives more broadly is support for upfront means testing or some other barrier (requiring people to request the money, for example, or subjecting it to 2020 income taxes) to reduce the overall expenditure. Perhaps it's my cynical expectation of perpetual federal insolvency talking, but I think that would be a mistake. The scale of our national debt is already so monstrous that penny-pinching pandemic relief aid will accomplish nothing good.

So if we're doing checks, it should be simple and democratic, with minimal bureaucracy and maximum opportunity for local redistribution.

There are several reasons why this is a good idea, none of which require affection for big government. First is the issue of speed. Means testing or requiring applications of any kind takes time. But the growing portion of those eight in 10 workers living paycheck-to-paycheck don't have time. Some live in municipalities, like New York City, where evictions and/or utilities cutoffs have been suspended, but not all. And even if their housing is temporarily safe and transport costs near zero, even the most Spartan quarantiners still have bills to pay.

Second is the reality that however much shutdowns may be the least worst option in many places the state is the party responsible for these losses of income. Eminent domain is a reasonable analogy here, and when your property is taken via eminent domain, you must be compensated. (The Fifth Amendment requires that "private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.") That compensation doesn't scale down for those with higher incomes, and rightly so.

Equally compelling, to my mind, is the real risk that means testing will prove destructively inaccurate. The preferred method seems to be checking income levels from 2018 tax returns but surely it's obvious that many people who were comfortable a year and a half ago are now on the brink of disaster?

I'm thinking of my friend who co-owns a local coffee shop, now shuttered indefinitely; or my friend the substitute teacher, who lost work when Minnesota closed all public schools through at least the end of the month; or my friend who works in mental health care in a hospital which could furlough her to make more room for COVID-19 patients. Whatever their 2018 tax returns said, that doesn't reflect their present reality. Here's a classic libertarian line: This isn't a call Washington will be able to make accurately. The feds aren't as smart as they think they are.

Finally, on a more hopeful note, simply sending checks to everyone allows those who don't need the extra money to give it to those who do. If "I still have a secure job" when a check shows up, tweeted Cato Institute scholar Scott Lincicome, "I'll blow it all on local restaurant gift cards and THEN donate all of those to my church." I hope to do something similar, and others will too. Thus permitting "citizens to make millions of separate and decentralized judgments about the needs in their communities will ... make the aid more effective overall," argued National Review writer and former columnist at The Week Michael Brendan Dougherty.

This is perhaps the most famous insight of libertarian economist F.A. Hayek (who, incidentally, supported a universal basic income, which these checks are on a temporary scale): No central authority can possibly collect all the local knowledge needed to plan a national economy. Indeed, "practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made," Hayek wrote in a 1945 contribution to The American Economic Review, "but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation."

The state does not know better than you or me about who in our communities is in sudden need. When and we all know there is no "if" here Washington borrows, loans, and spends enormous sums of money attempting to offset the economic distress the response to coronavirus has wrought, distributing responsibility for how that money is spent will make better use of local knowledge than any national means testing program can. The simpler and more democratic the relief spending, the more real good it will be able to do.

More here:

The small-government case for giving everyone a big check - The Week Magazine

The mortgage meltdown of 2008 was rough, but to me it seems that the last time life was so thoroughly upended was 9/11, nearly two decades ago. Since the first reports of positive tests for the new coronavirus (COVID-19) in Colorado on March 5, it feels like were living in a different world.

If youve been glued to your cable news or Twitter feed, you probably feel like youve been drinking from the proverbial firehouse. Whats a coronavirus, whats different about this one, whats its R naught, how likely are people to die from it, and what can we do, if anything, to beat it? For most of us the learning curve has been both steep and slippery, as even experts have struggled to get a handle on aspects of this disease.

Meanwhile, as government shuts down businesses across the state, the unemployment forms pile up, and people start to go stir-crazy from social distancing, a lot of us are wondering how far government should go in restricting peoples liberties. Is a heavy government hand really the only or best way to prevent needless death? And how should we weigh the harms of the disease against the harms of a devastated economy? Or is that question too horrible even to consider?

Bluntly, I dont have many definitive answers. And anyone who promises you easy answers to these questions is, well, lets just say they should get in line for some more toilet paper. What I think I can do is help set some context for fruitful ways to think about the questions.

Free-market advocates have pointed to the myriad ways that stupid government policies have hampered the response to the virus. For example, did you know that hospitals often have to (in effect) ask permission from their competitors in order to open new facilities and buy new equipment? Ridiculous. Indeed, one of the major steps that Governor Jared Polis and governors elsewhere took was to remove government barriers to the disease response, as by loosening regulations on hospitals and health professionals. The federal government notoriously tied up testing for the disease in bureaucratic red tapea profound failure.

Free-market advocates also have pointed to the crucial ways that private enterprise has stepped up to address the problem. As economist Tyler Cowen puts the point, Big business is helping America survive the coronavirus.

But even if we grant that politicians and bureaucrats have done a lot of really stupid things, and that business leaders have done many wonderful things to respond, it might still be the case that an important response to the virus (maybe the most important response) is the one by government. Thats the key question I want to consider here.

First, though, I need to dispel a common confusion. A lot of people, whether Progressive, conservative, or libertarian, see the fundamental issue as government power versus individual freedom. Often pitting power against freedom is a useful way to look at things, but it isnt the fundamental.

The fundamental is individual rights. Generally, although the form matters, government power exercised to protect rights is good, and an individual freely violating others rights is bad. The key point is theres nothing inherently suspect about government power; it depends on how and for what that power is used.

What does this have to do with the coronavirus? Here is the key point, as put by philosopher Michael Huemer of the University of Colorado at Boulder: Any individual who is at risk of carrying a communicable disease, such as COVID-19, is posing a risk of physical harm to others when he interacts with them. This potentially justifies government intervention, depending on details. In some contexts, government best preserves liberty by stopping people from infecting others. Your rights to publicly breathe out your germs may end where another persons lungs begin.

(Huemer actually is a libertarian anarchist. But he points out that most libertarians advocate government, and he thinks a private analogue to government properly may impose quarantines in certain circumstances. Im not a libertarian but I broadly agree with Huemer about the just use of force. I also recommend a video from the Ayn Rand Institute on this topic.)

What this principle does not do is give us easy answers for specific cases. A great deal depends on how contagious and deadly the virus is. We continually impose all sorts of risks on others, as by accidentally passing along the flu or by adding another vehicle to a busy road. If we knew the new coronavirus were as deadly as other coronaviruses or even a common flu, we certainly would not be talking about shutting down a huge chunk of the economy because of it. Unfortunately, COVID-19 seems to be quite a lot more contagious and deadly than more-common viral diseases, although, due to lack of widespread testing, we are to a large degree flying blind.

If you were hoping for a pat answer for what specifically government should do here, Im sorry, I cant give you one. What I can say is that individual rights matter and should set the framework for how government responds. I do think that current circumstances warrant some restrictions of movement.

Meanwhile, we can cheer on the people working on the new antivirals, vaccines, and expanded testing that promise to make social distancing and government quarantines a thing of the past.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.

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Armstrong: Liberty in the midst of a pandemic - Complete Colorado

Today, it is clearly being told not to go to the pub, as the Prime Ministers father has demonstrated. Perhaps, following Stanley Johnsons example, we shall soon start drifting back, just as people in 1940 soon stopped carrying their compulsory gas masks.

Although voluntary acceptance of unpleasant necessity is indispensable because the states power is limited, it is rarely if ever enough, or not for long. It has been pointed out that Boris Johnson is a natural liberal, even a libertarian, who is reticent to tell people what to do. However, in moments of genuine crisis, such instincts have had to be supplanted. Regulation and compulsion become necessary to back up voluntary action not to contradict it, but to supplement it. The best example in wartime is military service.

Until 1916, Britain relied on volunteers. But when volunteers dried up, conscription was accepted as necessary, not least because the families of volunteers wanted all other families to share the burden. I am proud of the fact that the Government today has begun by appealing to our sense of public spirit, and did not immediately turn to compulsion.

Perhaps the French are different: one French epidemiologist believes that they find it very difficult psychologically to accept social distancing, and certainly Macrons early appeals were ignored. Nevertheless, our own national tradition is not simply one of unfettered libertarianism. Even in the 19th century, when every Englishmans home was his castle, local health authorities had far more powers to interfere than anywhere on the Continent. There, troops were deployed to enforce mass quarantines; here, the sanitary inspector came to call.

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At war, Britons can be trusted to do the right thing - Telegraph.co.uk